Convert JPG to text

Turn JPEG photos and scans into plain text files, one per image, without uploading them.

Drop JPG images to convert to textor click to choose files. Batches welcome.

    Reads printed English text. The first run downloads the text reader (about 6 MB) from this site; after that it works offline.

    Working…

    Done

    Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.

    JPG is what cameras, phones and most scanners save, so it is usually the format a page of text arrives in. This page reads each JPG and gives you the text inside it, on screen to copy and as a .txt file with the same name as the image.

    Drop a folder of scanned pages and they are read one after another, then Download all saves every text file in one zip. The work happens in your browser, so a stack of scanned contracts, invoices or old letters never leaves your computer.

    JPEG compression blurs fine detail, which can trip up OCR on small print. If you are scanning, save at 300 dpi and a high quality setting, and the text will come out cleaner.

    How it works

    1. Drop one or more JPG files, or tap to pick them.
    2. Choose line breaks as in the image, or joined into paragraphs.
    3. Read text. Copy each result, or download the .txt files, several as one zip.

    In your browser, not on a server

    Your browser decodes the image (libheif or the Squoosh decoders step in for HEIC, AVIF and JPEG XL), enlarges small screenshots so letters are big enough to read, and hands the pixels to Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine first built at HP and later developed by Google, compiled to WebAssembly by tesseract.js (Apache-2.0). Its neural network model for English is served by this site and loaded the first time you run it. The text is recognised line by line inside a worker in your tab.

    Compared with upload-based tools: The pictures people want text from are often private: a letter, a receipt, a bank statement, a prescription, a screenshot of a conversation. Online OCR sites upload the image to their server to read it and keep it for hours, and several limit free use or ask for an account. Here the image never leaves your device, and the page keeps working with Wi-Fi off.

    Verify it yourself. Load this page, turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode, and run the tool. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.

    Questions

    What resolution works best?

    Text where a capital letter is at least 20 pixels tall reads best. A full page scanned at 300 dpi, or a phone photo of one page, is plenty. Very small images are enlarged automatically before reading.

    Can I convert a multi-page scan?

    Drop all the pages at once. Each JPG becomes its own .txt file; copy them in order to rebuild the document.

    Is the file uploaded anywhere?

    No. There is no server in this process. The page is a static file and the work is done by code running inside your browser tab. You can load the page, turn off Wi-Fi, and it still works.

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